


take yourself home

by moonix



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Exy (All For The Game), Asexual Character, Bartender!Andrew, Beaches, Children of Characters, Demisexual Neil Josten, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Fluff, Found Family, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Never Have I Ever, No mafia backstory, Some mature themes but no smut, Summer, The twins don't meet until later in life, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:34:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23670889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonix/pseuds/moonix
Summary: Despite his best efforts, Andrew finds himself a family.
Relationships: Aaron Minyard & Andrew Minyard, Andrew Minyard & The Foxes, Neil Josten & Aaron Minyard, Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard
Comments: 187
Kudos: 1345





	take yourself home

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: some mentions of heavier themes like addiction, childhood abuse, toxic families, self harm, and mental health issues, but nothing really explicit. Sex is discussed at some point but not had on screen.
> 
> Shout-out to Bee for educating me on all things Florida and to Rebecca for piling love on me when I needed it most.

“Cute redhead checking you out at four o’clock,” Roland tells him, reaching around Andrew for the bottle of grenadine. Light winks off the creamy red liquid and Andrew wipes at the sticky residue on his fingers, splits the fat belly of a physalis on the rim of a tall cocktail glass and balances a skewer of pineapple on another before sliding them down the bar.

He’s noticed the redhead, but cute is not the word Andrew would use to describe him. Calling him cute would be like calling a lion a cat—not technically wrong, but… misleading. This guy is not the kind of cat you’d feed and let sleep in your bed.

Not that Andrew lets anyone sleep in his bed, anyway.

Still. A lion is a lion is a cat, and Andrew’s only human. From what he can see in the golden pockets of light dotted around the bar like honeycomb, the guy is his type. Wiry and athletic, a body poised to run. Bones light and graceful as a bird’s. His mouth is flat and barren, but Andrew catches it in motion when he tells Roland his order, and—he can very easily picture it doing a variety of sinful things, is Andrew’s point.

He’s not even obvious about the staring. Andrew only grew aware of it because he’s well accustomed to this dance of plausible deniability, the I’m-not-looking-unless-you-are dance, where eyes turn into rabbits turn back into eyes. It doesn’t usually happen in Eden’s, where the unspoken rule is that people wouldn’t be here unless they were hungry, but. There’s the unspoken part, and Andrew’s served his fair share of anxious first-timers. In fact, he almost prefers them to the openly starving mouths that expect him to feed them, because at least they tend to follow the rules.

Andrew takes his time with the next order. He practices some gimmicks Roland taught him—casually tossing and twirling bottles, flicking napkins so they spin dizzyingly onto the counter, flipping the open shaker with liquid inside without spilling a drop, fooling around with the bottle opener. Eden’s isn’t the type of place where you get applause for cheap tricks, but he can feel several appreciative pairs of eyes on him, and some guy even leaves his number scrawled on a napkin which Andrew throws away without a glance.

Not-cute redhead sticks around, and the next time there’s a brief lull in orders, Andrew tells Roland he’s taking a break. He catches Red’s eye and inclines his head toward the door behind him, not waiting for him to make up his mind on whether to follow. The door swings shut behind him, muffling the noise, then opens again briefly as the guy slips through.

“I have ten minutes,” Andrew says, pulling a condom out of his back pocket. He checks the store room—deserted—and turns around.

“Oh,” Red says, bemused. “I, uh, shit.”

Andrew arches an eyebrow. Probably a first-timer, then. He looks inexplicably softer in the stark light of the corridor: bloodshot eyes the colour of bruised plums, mouth soaked red with grenadine, his hair flopping awkwardly sideways and his faded grey t-shirt looking like it’s been washed one too many times. There’s something oddly charming about him, something… deliberately non-threatening, Andrew thinks.

A lion is a cat. A cute guy is not.

“Sorry,” Red says, teetering on the edge of sheepish. “I didn’t—that’s not why—I mean. So. Uh. Shit, okay, Matt is never going to let me live this down. Should’ve let him do this part, really…”

He trails off, shakes himself.

“I’m not into threesomes,” Andrew says, frowning. Red makes a wounded sound—laughing, he’s definitely laughing, even if just for a moment. Then he reigns himself back in and shakes his head.

“No, me neither. I’m Neil.”

“Neil,” Andrew repeats, and Neil looks half pleased like Andrew just performed some mnemonic feat. “Do you want me to suck you off or not?”

“No,” Neil says, managing to keep a better hold on his poker face this time. “Sorry, I—didn’t think. I mean, obviously. But. I wanted to talk to you?”

First-timer with illusions about the kinds of encounters that are to be had in a place like Eden’s. Great.

“Let me stop you right there,” Andrew says, because rules are rules. “I don’t do talking. I don’t do hand-holding, or dates, or meeting the parents, or whatever else you have in mind. If that’s what you’re after, you need to go somewhere else.”

He flicks his fingers, slips the condom packet back into his pocket with his other hand and calculates how many minutes he has left to his break before he has to go back. He should probably eat something. His stomach lining feels like it’s shrunk in the wash, though it’s long past the point of actual hunger. Did he have breakfast? He might have had breakfast.

Probably. Maybe.

He’s already turning away, but then Neil calls out his name. Andrew stops in his tracks. Even Roland isn’t usually in the habit of giving out names to strangers for free. Andrew will have to have words with him—

“Andrew, wait,” Neil says, melting the syllables down on his tongue like beeswax. “I… I know your brother.”

Cheap shot.

“Yeah?” Andrew scoffs. “Tell me, Neil. What does this brother of mine look like?”

He expects him to fumble, to trip over his blatant lie, because of course Andrew doesn’t have a brother—but Neil only straightens up and pulls out his phone.

“Pretty much exactly like you,” he says, holding up the phone.

-

Later, Andrew can’t remember any of the photos Neil showed him. That’s not quite true—he can remember everything painfully clearly, except for _him_.

Like looking at the negatives, Andrew recalls the chipped pink hairclip in the tight ringlets of his wife’s hair, the happy-blurry corner booth stacked with his friends like colourful Tetris pieces, the exact shade of the crayon in the little girl’s hand, even the placement of the spots on their dog’s wagging tail. Everything but his face, which is strange, because it’s supposed to be his own face, and shouldn’t Andrew remember his own face?

Something about vampires and mirrors tickles at the back of his mind and he gets up abruptly, walks into his bathroom and flicks the lights on. There. His eyes, narrowed to a pinprick, the brown muddying the green in his irises more than usual from how tired he is. The little bump from where a broken nose didn’t heal quite right, the faded scar across one cheekbone. Chapped lips because he ran out of that stupid, expensive, cookie-dough-flavoured lip scrub that he bought on a whim during his last drunk online shopping escapade. Barely more than a whisper of stubble on his jaw. His hair is still carefully styled, though some of the strands have started teasing at his face again despite the product keeping them back. He’s running low on that, too.

And yet, when he turns off the light and walks out of the bathroom, it’s all gone. Blank. A black hole of a person, surrounded by the debris of someone else’s life.

_Aaron_ , Neil had said. _Aaron Minyard_.

Andrew’s been a Doe all his life. A nobody. Just once, he’d teetered on the knife edge of someone else’s name, but he’s made peace with it over the years. Doe is straightforward, Doe doesn’t pull punches. Still. He should at least try it out: Andrew Minyard, flick and spin it on his tongue like a handle of vodka, taste how it sounds, but—

He goes to bed, instead.

-

Aaron Minyard is easy to find on Facebook. He has a wife, two daughters, a dog (named Spot, fitting if not very inspired) and two guinea pigs (named Bark and Howl, for reasons undisclosed online). He works as a paediatric surgeon; his wife is a neurologist at the same hospital. They went to Germany on their last holiday, to visit a cousin named Nicky Klose, whose profile paints a vivid picture of the kind of person he is and the life he leads.

Andrew lingers over him a little longer, mouse hovering on the rainbow flag in his profile picture before closing the tab.

While he processes all that, Andrew clicks through Aaron’s friends—some colleagues from the hospital, some people he went to school with, a few he shares with his wife, and a couple members of an old college sports team. He finds Neil, whose profile is bare except for a few pictures and messages other people have tagged him in, and a profile picture of an impossibly fat ginger cat exposing his white belly to the camera.

Andrew shuts his laptop and riffles through his cupboards in search of food. He comes up with a few last slices of not-quite-expired bread and a jar of marmite that Roland gifted him as a joke, something about stunted growth and lacking nutrients when he grew up, which is probably true. Andrew toasts the bread and eats it as is.

He sleeps until six before dragging himself into the bathroom to get ready for work. Through the cracked screen of his phone he scrolls through yet another Instagram account by yet another person that is somehow connected to Aaron Minyard, brushing his teeth until his gums bleed and running wet hands through his hair. Maybe he should leave it unstyled, like Aaron, just this once. He glances at his phone, then squirts an excessive amount of gel into his palms and rubs it in with more vigour than usual.

He goes to work and it feels like sleepwalking. Business as usual. The club is only just waking up, stretching and blinking sleep from its eyes. Andrew preps the bar, fills little bowls with wasabi peanuts, chips and pretzels to soak up some of the alcohol and stave off the first rush of drunk people causing trouble. One of the security guys is trying to catch Andrew’s eye, but Andrew isn’t in the mood. He takes a break when everything is ready, fixing himself a cup of shitty coffee in the staff kitchen and pouring half of Roland’s hazelnut creamer in the mug until it’s sort of, just about drinkable.

Settling against the counter, he pulls out his phone and dials the number Neil had left him with.

“Tell me how you found me,” he says without preamble when Neil answers. Neil makes a sleepy, amused noise and Andrew wonders if he woke him up, but he checks the clock and it’s not even midnight.

“Sweet, you just won me ten bucks,” Neil says. “Matt was convinced we wouldn’t hear from you before the end of the week.”

Andrew brushes away the slight, cobwebby irritation at being predictable and takes a sip of his coffee.

“Well?” he prompts. There’s a strange, squeaking sound on the other end, then a clatter and something like a window being closed.

“Right,” Neil says. “So, well, Aaron didn’t know he had a twin until his—well, his mom died. Sorry, I guess. Though to be honest it wasn’t a, I mean, I’m not allowed to say this but, good riddance. She was horrible?”

Andrew makes an uninterested grunt. It’s not like he had any illusions, after all this time.

“Anyway, he found some paperwork from the adoption agency when he cleared out her house. He probably thought it was proof of a last smidgen of sentimentality in her, but personally I think she was just a slob. We helped him clean up after her and it was one of the messiest, grossest places I’ve ever seen, so.”

There’s the hiss of a spray bottle in the background, then the squeaking sound comes again, slightly muffled this time.

“Oh, shit, I just scared my cat. Anyway, so he got in touch with the adoption agency, but they didn’t really have any records, or at least nothing they were willing to give him. He obsessed over it for so long that we had to stage an intervention. Long story short, we turned it into a game—like, we’d all look for clues and stuff, and there was this big sweepstake going on about who’d find you first. Weirdly enough, there was never any doubt _that_ we’d find you, which, considering the odds—”

“And yet, here you are,” Andrew interrupts. “So, how did you?”

“Well, uh, the thing is…”

“Was it illegal?”

“Maybe,” Neil hedges.

“Interesting,” Andrew says.

“Anyway,” Neil says again. Squeak, goes the weird background noise.

“What are you doing,” Andrew asks, scowling when he realises he’s finished his coffee already.

“Uh, cleaning the windows,” Neil says.

“Cleaning the windows,” Andrew repeats. “At night.”

“They were dirty,” Neil says, as if that explains everything. “So, what else do you want to know?”

“Did you tell him?”

“That I found you? Not yet,” Neil hums. “Was gonna wait until you called. Which you did.”

“Right,” Andrew says.

“Do you want to meet him?” Neil asks, and Andrew puts his mug in the dishwasher and skirts past Roland carrying a tray of glasses.

“I have to go,” he says, a cop-out so he doesn’t trip on all the possible answers jostling for space in his brain.

“Think about it,” Neil tells him. Like it’s that simple. “He’s a huge dork and a bit of an ass, but he’s alright. More so now he has the kids.”

“Have fun cleaning,” Andrew says and hangs up.

-

The next time he calls Neil, Neil is reorganising someone’s video game collection. They talk about UFOs, for some reason, and Neil’s mother’s obsession with conspiracy theories. Neil tells him about the time he went to the Kennedy Space Center with Aaron and Katelyn, how they collectively geeked out over the exhibits and spent an entire day there.

“Aaron spilled a milkshake all over himself,” Neil reminisces fondly. “Good times. And Katelyn and I went into the shuttle launch simulator thing, but it wasn’t as exciting as I expected. Oh, hello.”

There’s a rustling noise and then a breathy purr filters through the phone before Neil manages to rescue it from his cat’s amorous advances.

“Sir says hi. He thinks I haven’t fed him yet, even though I definitely did.”

“Sir?”

“Fat Cat,” Neil says. “McCatterson.”

“Good grief,” Andrew says. Neil huffs a laugh.

“ _Good grief_?” he teases. “You sound like my uncle. Do you also wear sweater vests and pocket squares?”

“No,” Andrew says, and belatedly remembers that he owns a few of each. “…not _usually_. Not together, anyway.”

“Oh my god,” Neil laughs. “You’re just as dorky as Aaron.”

Andrew wants to protest, but he doesn’t actually know Aaron, so he swallows it down.

“Tell me more,” he demands. He has all this knowledge at his disposal all of a sudden, brimming under his fingernails, and barely knows where to put it. All his pockets are overflowing, yet he can’t seem to get enough, collecting every pebble and twig like they’re precious stones.

“Let’s see,” Neil muses. “He fucking hates bugs. Katelyn carries bug spray everywhere because he can play connect the dots with his mosquito bites. He’s an impatient little bastard but will gladly wait forty-five minutes for a pub sub. We’ve been to a couple hurricane parties and he got drunk at every single one of them because he was secretly terrified. When we were in college he used to go into Publix and ask for a free cookie even though he was clearly far too old but they always gave him one because of how short he is? It was kind of hilarious. What else…”

He trails off and Andrew listens to him shuffle around on the other end for a minute, lying very still on the couch as Neil thinks.

“He’s mostly indifferent about the beach but still goes a couple of times a year because Katelyn and the kids love it. There’s this old old ice-cream place on New Smyrna Beach that he loves, called Frozen Gold. Katelyn’s dad used to go there in his old surfing days, it’s that old. His favourite is Moose Tracks, and he and Katelyn argue about it every time because she is a fun sponge and hates peanuts.”

Andrew looks at the whirring ceiling fan and lets his gaze blur pleasantly at the edges. He hasn’t been to the beach in two years, but he can almost feel the sand bulging between his toes and the melting ice cream drip down his hands in sticky tracks.

There’s something about Neil’s voice, how he talks. The soft susurration of the s and sh sounds, like a very, very faint lisp; the billow of his vowels like faded flags twisting in the breeze on a hot day. Andrew couldn’t place his accent on a map, but it’s… nice.

“Tell me more,” he demands, and Neil does.

-

Aaron is late.

He sweeps into the coffee shop looking harried with his arms full of toddler, glances around once and walks straight over to the corner table by the window that Andrew’s claimed.

“Sorry, uh,” he says and grimaces. “The babysitter cancelled at short notice and Katelyn couldn’t take her, so…”

The little girl squirms and freezes when she catches sight of Andrew. She has downy, flyaway ginger curls dotted haphazardly with rainbow hairclips and is wearing a dungaree dress with a panda face on the front. She points at Andrew with a decisive hand and announces: “Dada!”

“No, honey, I’m over here,” Aaron says, slightly sheepish. “This is Andrew, he’s… Andrew. Okay? Andrew. Andrew, this is Lila.”

“Dada,” she repeats, with an edge of delight as if two dadas are an unexpected windfall.

“She calls everything dada at the moment,” Aaron explains, “even the dog. So don’t let it get to your head.”

A breathy laugh puffs from his mouth like steam on a cold day. Lila seizes his momentary distraction to launch herself at the sugar bowl on the table. Andrew hears Aaron’s startled hiss and reflexively grabs the little ceramic pot, pulling it safely out of reach before Lila can get to it.

“Thanks,” Aaron sighs. “Lila, honey, you have your own toys, yeah? Here, look…”

“What’s your order,” Andrew asks as Aaron pulls out a variety of stuffed animals, rice crackers and shiny, jingly things from the bulging cloth bag still draped across his chest. Aaron squints over at the chalkboard menu above the counter in a way that makes Andrew suspect he also needs glasses.

“Some sort of pumpkin spice thing?” Aaron says hopefully. “As long as it has caffeine. And no dairy.”

Andrew gets up, ignoring the wallet Aaron tries to dislodge from his pocket one-handed. He gets two of the same dark, syrupy concoctions with frothy almond milk and brings them back to the table, where Lila is in the process of crumbling her rice crackers all over her dad.

“Thanks,” Aaron sighs, carefully curving his body around her to take a sip of his coffee. “You, uh, you come here often?”

“Sometimes,” Andrew admits. “They open late.”

“Right,” Aaron hums. “Neil said you’re a bartender?”

Andrew considers saying something like, “For the time being,” or, “I’m still looking for a better job, obviously,” but instead settles on a non-committal shrug. The truth is he has no idea what he’s doing. No direction. No ultimate goal. There’s no cushy career, no wife and one point five kids and a house and a dog waiting for him at the end of the line. Just that: a line, and a line, and a line.

He never even expected to make it this far. Some days it still feels like he won’t survive past his thirtieth birthday, despite the fact that he is two years past that now.

Aaron fills some of the silence with erratic, random chatter. Like Andrew, he’s not a natural at small-talk, but he seems to have more practice at doing it anyway. Most likely he had to learn for his job. Andrew replies to a few questions, nods occasionally. When all else fails they can at least rely on Lila as a buffer, to the point where Andrew wonders if the babysitter really cancelled or if Aaron took her along on purpose.

His coffee is dwindling down to its dregs when Lila bangs her sippy cup on the table so hard that the lid comes off, spraying Aaron and the floor with juice. He utters a single, startled, “Crap,” and there’s a beat of silence before a horrified look streaks into Aaron’s expression and Lila, very loudly and joyfully, repeats the word for the entire café to hear.

“Oh, sh—ah, um,” Aaron utters, sounding more resigned than upset. “Katelyn is going to kill me.”

“I won’t tell if you don’t,” Andrew promises. A fleeting smile tiptoes across Aaron’s face before he looks down at his soaked legs and sighs, and Andrew adds: “Go clean up, I can take her.”

They both freeze momentarily. Then, slowly, Aaron says: “If you’re sure?”

Andrew moves his hands up in an understated sort of ready gesture. Aaron gets up, hoisting Lila along.

“Well—yeah, okay. Mind you, she’s heavier than she looks.”

He plonks her in Andrew’s hands, not letting go until Andrew has sufficiently demonstrated that he is, in fact, not going to drop her. Then he rummages for a towel and starts dabbing at his trousers, half-watching Andrew and Lila as they stare each other down.

“Dada,” Lila says again, briefly wringing her little hands before reaching for Andrew’s glasses.

“No,” Andrew tells her, moving his head back.

Miraculously, she stops.

They look at each other for a few more moments, then Andrew turns her around and settles her more comfortably on his lap, careful to keep as much distance between them as possible. Lila, who is not aware of this endeavour, instantly slumps against his chest and curls one sticky hand in the fabric of his shirt. She has the same vaguely mucus-y smell that Andrew associates with small children in general, but it’s not as unpleasant as it should be.

“Look at what you did, you little menace,” Andrew says, pointing to where Aaron is frantically trying to mop the floor with some crumpled-up napkins, red-faced and wedged half underneath the table. Lila burbles some incoherent nonsense and sounds very pleased with herself. She makes a grabby motion across the table and Andrew entertains himself by offering her everything except the stuffed fox she’s angling for, aware that Aaron has finished his futile efforts at reducing the mess and is watching him with barely concealed amusement.

“You’re good with kids, huh?”

The question blindsides Andrew for a moment. It is not something he has ever thought about in the context of himself. Most of the extent of his experience with children comes from being the oldest kid in a foster home, or even just the only one unwilling to sleep through the constant crying from the crib next door.

He picks up the fox—it’s an ugly little thing but it’s soft and worn, clearly well-loved, one of its pointy ears nearly chewed to a clump—and places it in Lila’s waiting hand.

“Your father is a funny little man,” he tells her, because it’s easier to talk to her than answer the question directly. “You should keep an eye on him, you know. Make sure he doesn’t get into trouble.”

“Miaow,” Lila says, very seriously, holding up the fox.

“That could not more clearly be a fox,” Andrew says. “It’s orange.”

“Cats can be orange,” Aaron says wryly. “In fact, Neil’s is very orange. Lila is besotted with the poor thing.”

Andrew ignores the way something in him thrills a little at the mention of Neil’s name.

“Dada miaow,” Lila demands, shaking her fox at Andrew.

“I’m afraid I don’t have a cat,” Andrew tells her. “Do you think Neil would let me borrow his?”

“No,” is what Lila thinks. God knows if she even understood the question. Aaron’s muffled laughter pulls Andrew’s attention back to the conversation they aren’t having.

“How did Neil say he found you again?” Aaron asks, squinting at him.

“He didn’t,” Andrew says.

“Huh,” Aaron makes, unconvinced.

“Take your spawn back,” Andrew says, trying to unstick Lila’s death grip from his shirt. “She’s getting fox hair all over my things.”

“I’d worry more about the glitter,” Aaron grins, gesturing to where a corner of Lila’s dress has left a smudge of pink and silver glitter on Andrew. “Sorry. I think she and Rosie were working on some craft project this morning. Something about Disney princesses.”

Andrew sighs. If he throws that shirt in the wash now, that glitter will just end up getting on everything. Maybe he can trick Roland into taking it home and doing his laundry for him.

“Which one are you, then?” Andrew asks Lila. “The frozen one or the mermaid or the Scottish one?”

“The Scottish one?” Aaron scrunches up his face, confused. Lila throws her fox at the neighbouring table with a hearty yell, sending her curls flying.

“Definitely the Scottish one,” Andrew decides as Aaron gets up to apologise and collect the wayward stuffed animal.

They part ways soon after that, or rather, they exchange stilted goodbyes and “let’s do this again some time”s and then Aaron totters off with Lila having a noisy tantrum in his arms and Andrew gets in his car, turns the air conditioning up as far as it will go, and sits in the cold blast of silence until his brain stops buzzing inside his skull.

As a child, he spent his summers sitting on the electrical boxes outside various foster homes, eating watermelon or popsicles or just staring into space, being slowly baked by the sun until it sank below the horizon. Just life passing him by, or him passing life by. The memories of those sunsets has grown a bit fuzzy over time, like peach skin and mould, but he tries to line them up in metaphorical jars along the shelves of his mind, counting as he goes. One: citrusy bright, like pulpy orange juice, searing his retinas. Two: deep, feverish blue like the hottest part of a flame, burning red-hot at the edges. Three: sweet cotton candy tufts of pink and white and crunchy, caramelised yellow. Four: smeared cherry red and deep, pulsing veins of pink. Five…

He reaches the end of the first shelf, takes a deep breath and drives himself home.

-

Therapy the next day feels like chewing a wad of old gum, but once he’s spit it out and brushed his teeth he feels freshened up enough to call Neil.

“Have you been to Universal,” Andrew says when Neil picks up.

“Yeah,” Neil says seamlessly, “once with Matt and Dan and once with Allison. It was fun.”

“Did you try the Butterbeer,” Andrew asks.

“I had a sip of Allison’s, but it was so sweet I kind of wanted to rip my tongue out.”

“Dramatic,” Andrew huffs. Neil is very particular about soda—Andrew isn’t sure how the hell he came to know this about him, but he does—and he’s about to goad him into having another rant about the right lemon to sugar ratio in lemonade when Neil changes the topic.

“How’d it go with Aaron?”

“What,” Andrew says, “am I supposed to believe Aaron didn’t tell you anything?”

“No, but I want to hear it from you.”

Andrew bites the tip of his tongue to stop himself from asking what Aaron said. He slowly unpacks his gym bag, throwing the sweat-soaked clothes in the laundry hamper and hanging the towels up to dry, sorting through the jumble of protein bars at the bottom of the bag as he sorts through his thoughts.

“You were right,” he says at last. “He is a dork.”

Neil snorts a delighted laugh.

“How did you meet him, anyway?” Andrew deflects, sinking into his beanbag chair. There’s a bruise on his arm from sparring that he should probably ice, but he can’t be bothered getting up again now. “And don’t say you bonded over sports.”

“Mm, well,” Neil says. His voice is familiar enough now that Andrew can close his eyes and conjure it in his head, but hearing it is—better. More. “We were on the same team, but Aaron was kind of, stand-offish? He wasn’t interested in socialising with us, despite Dan’s best efforts, and she can be pretty persuasive when she wants to be. I mean, she managed to bully Kevin into coming to team pizza nights more often than not.”

Kevin is Kevin Day, Andrew’s brain helpfully regurgitates. Tall and tanned, handsome in an angular, boyish way, with broad shoulders and spring green eyes and a tiny, charming gap between his front teeth. His smile always looks exactly the same in every picture, like he practiced it in front of a mirror. Candid shots usually show him scowling or mid-argument. He’s all of Andrew’s unfortunate straight guy crushes from high school merged into one, and Andrew feels an almost visceral disgust at himself whenever he scrolls through Kevin’s social media.

“Anyway, I was Katelyn’s friend first,” Neil is saying, unaware of Andrew’s mental tangent. “She was kind of just there, because Allison and Seth both briefly dated as many of the cheerleaders as they could to make each other jealous, and Renee, being Renee, ended up making friends with most of them, so they started tagging along to team things. Katelyn found out I was good with statistics and bullied me into coming to her study group. Everyone knew that Aaron had a thing for her, even Katelyn, but he was too chickenshit to make a move. By this time Aaron and I had this kind of unspoken, friendly-ish competition going, so eventually I just told everyone that I was going to ask her out just so he’d try and beat me to it. Guess I didn’t realise that him getting together with Katelyn meant I’d have to hang out with him, too.”

He sounds more fond than annoyed, his voice warm like rough brick at the end of a hot summer day. There’s probably an ASMR niche somewhere on YouTube for a voice like that, Andrew thinks.

“How about you?” Neil says after a pause. “How’d you meet your friends?”

There’s a hole in Andrew’s sock that Andrew hadn’t noticed before. Andrew stares at it for a moment, too comfortable in the embrace of his beanbag to do anything about it.

“I didn’t,” he says.

“Childhood friends, huh?” Neil says. “Must be nice. We were all a bit fucked up by the time we met in college, but somehow we made it work. It’s pizza night tonight, by the way. Do you wanna come?”

Andrew does not, but somehow he agrees to it anyway. He changes into a different shirt, then puts the one he was wearing before back on and sprays some more deodorant under his arms just to be on the safe side. The day is just smouldering down and there’s a damp chill to the air when he steps outside. The sky is streaked green and gold and the palm trees and power lines are bristling and writhing in the wind. Andrew has to actively steer against it on his way downtown, but at least that takes his mind off where he’s headed.

Pizza night takes place at Giovanni’s, the group’s designated Italian restaurant. As far as Andrew can tell there’s no one actually named Giovanni working there, and the guy who owns it is called Steve. It looks like someone watched the cheesiest rom-com they could find and did their best to recreate the setting of the first date: red chequered tablecloths, wine bottles with candles in them, shelves filled with pasta and coffee beans, chalkboard menus adorned with the Italian flag, dim lighting and Italian music crooning in the background. Several tables have been pushed together for them in the back room and someone’s already ordered a selection of wine and water for the group, along with complimentary bread baskets and a platter of antipasti.

He ends up wedged between Neil and a short, curvy girl with white hair and an undercut dyed in bi pride colours, visible where she’s tied the thin strands up into a little ponytail. Andrew thinks he saw her in a few group pictures, though she doesn’t seem to have more than a passing presence on social media. Her arms are bare, revealing sculpted muscles and stark geometrical tattoos that contrast with the soft smile on her face and the whimsical sun dress and flip flops she’s wearing.

“Yeah, don’t underestimate her,” Neil mutters, leaning in close to make himself heard above the noise of everyone greeting each other and finding their seats. “The others will tell you Renee’s a sweetheart, but she’s fucking scary. Don’t piss her off.”

“Hi,” Renee smiles, offering him her hand but not looking offended when he doesn’t shake it. “I’m Renee. Welcome to the family.”

The word sits in Andrew’s stomach like an olive pit swallowed by accident. He steals a slice of ciabatta from a basket just for something to shove in his mouth when people talk to him, though most of the group seem happy to chatter away at him or each other without even waiting for a response. He recognises Allison Reynolds—professional ex-heiress, fashionista, influencer; every inch the glossy, sun-kissed Instagram queen she is online. She’s kind of hard to miss even if she wasn’t towering over everyone in lethal heels, wearing a neon pink wraparound bikini top and mint green sunglasses large enough to put Andrew in mind of an oversized fly. Matt looks even taller in real life than in his pictures, Dan’s laugh is just as loud and booming as hers suggest. Seth is an asshole just as Neil warned him, Kevin is handsome and charming until he’s not. Aaron’s wife introduces herself to Andrew a little nervously but she rallies when Aaron puts an arm around her, and for a moment Andrew feels a jealous stab somewhere in his abdomen that this woman is more familiar, more at ease with Andrew’s own flesh and blood than he is.

But flesh is just flesh and blood is just blood, and regret isn’t something Andrew believes in, so he forces himself to endure a bit of small-talk before the food arrives and the novelty of his presence wears off in the face of copious marinara sauce and more wine. Neil is warm and animated next to him, jumpy like a little bunny but full of snarky, spitfire comments and easy glances. There are a few faded scars crisscrossing his brown skin where he’s pushed his sleeves up to his elbows and he exudes a restless energy, his knees bouncing under the table and his fingers fidgeting constantly with things—sugar packets, breadstick wrappers, napkins, the wax dripping down from the candles in their wine bottles.

“Nice bruise, by the way,” Renee murmurs conspiratorially when the attention has wandered down the table to an argument between Seth and Kevin. Andrew touches his jaw where it’s still slightly sore from the hit he took—his trainer at the gym is not known for pulling punches on her regulars.

Renee, it turns out, teaches classes at a nearby dojo. She’s trained in about a dozen different fighting styles (and ballet, she adds with a grin) and she “dabbles” in rock-climbing in her free time, which, as Neil informs him, means she’s really fucking good at it but too modest to say so. Renee just laughs and shakes her head, but before the end of the night, Andrew has snagged himself a sparring date for his next day off and Neil is looking at him pityingly like he’s just scheduled his own execution.

Just in case he’s right, Andrew orders a large wedge of tiramisu for dessert. The pasta was good, but this—this he can get behind. It’s just the perfect balance of tangy and creamy, sweet and bitter, boozy and caffeinated, and Andrew all but licks his plate clean. An appropriate last meal.

His therapist may be onto something when she says there are certain things worth living for in this bleak world. The tiramisu might even be worth the upset stomach he’s going to have later.

“Hey, do you want to go to the beach with us next weekend?” Neil says when they’re down to the last round of espresso and grappa and the restaurant is starting to empty of other guests. Aaron and Katelyn have already gone home to relieve their babysitter and some of the others have trickled out after them, but Andrew is feeling a little too full and sluggish in the warm pool of candlelight, stuffed with food and poached comfortably in wine and coffee.

“Not particularly,” Andrew mutters, poking at a few spilled grains of sugar on the table. His stomach makes a gurgly sound, which is as good a sign as any that he should be going home sooner rather than later. And yet.

“It’ll be fun,” Neil goads. He looks ridiculously soft and vulnerable in a flannel button-down shirt. Andrew imagines him wearing a pair of tight swimming trunks instead, asking Andrew to rub sunscreen into his back.

“Fine,” he says, getting up at last. “But I’m driving myself.”

-

He ends up driving Neil and Kevin, too, because the other cars are full and Neil admits with a sheepish smile that his trashcan of a vehicle is currently in the garage with little hope of revival. Allison and Renee are surrounded by at least three over-excited dogs and a puppy-dog-eyed young man named Jean. Seth is showing off his motorcycle, Aaron and Katelyn are wrestling their daughters into their seats along with a multitude of bags and inflatables, and Dan and Matt have two teenagers in the back, one of whom is Matt’s son from a previous relationship.

“Matt didn’t know about Jaden until about two years ago when the state sued him for alimony, it was all pretty wild. Took them a while to adjust but now Jaden spends every other weekend with them. It all worked out well in the end because Dan never wanted a baby and Matt’s like, a natural dad.”

Neil is standing so close that Andrew can smell the thick, creamy scent of his sunscreen. Kevin is a way off talking to—or rather, _at_ —Jean, but the cloud of tea tree oil he exudes is so strong it layers over everything, tinting all other smells slightly green.

“And the other one?” Andrew asks.

“Oh, Ezra? They’re Jaden’s _friend_ ,” Neil says, though he does so with a very meaningful eyebrow-raise-hand-wave gesture that makes Andrew think there might be more to it than that.

“I see,” Andrew says. He’s keeping to the outskirts of the group, watching the madness unfold and nodding to a few people who catch his eye.

“Andrew! Glad you could make it,” Katelyn calls over, waving at him. Lila is being strapped into her car seat by her dad, but the older one, Rosie, peeks her head out of the car to look at him. She’s a beanstalk of a girl, with long blond hair and serious eyes. Aaron says she’s a precocious know-it-all, but he painstakingly sent Andrew all the pictures of her posing with her science fair awards, even the ones that clearly hadn’t been digitalised yet, so he doesn’t fool Andrew.

“Piece of advice,” Aaron shouts over the din when he’s done with Lila, “do not eat Kevin’s sandwiches, no matter what he tells you.”

Andrew wants to ask him to expand on that, but there’s some unspoken signal rallying everyone to get in the cars. Neil calls shotgun before Kevin has detached himself from Jean and Kevin sprawls grumpily in the back, complaining about Neil adjusting his seat too far back even though Kevin has much longer legs. Andrew already has a headache before Kevin has even switched to questioning Andrew about where he went to college (nowhere), what he did after school (nothing), what his opinions on current sporting events are (non-existent), what his workout routine is (whatever strikes his fancy) and whether he wants a sandwich (no).

“It’s like pulling teeth,” Kevin mutters after a very one-sided conversation, finally leaning back in his seat.

“It’s like talking to Aaron, you mean,” Neil grins. “Guess you guys share the reticent asshole gene.”

“At least we avoided the blathering nuisance gene,” Andrew retorts.

“Yeah, that one’s terminal, unfortunately,” Neil says, amused. Kevin doesn’t even realise they’re making fun of him and keeps talking about an article he read on twin genetics, and Andrew turns the music up another notch until he can barely hear him over the roar of the engine and Troye Sivan’s dulcet tones crooning from the speakers.

When they arrive at the beach they stake out a spot sheltered by some rocks, wind streaming around them and the sun coarse as sand on Andrew’s skin. Matt blasts music from a pair of portable speakers and Allison passes out drinks from a cooler, Jaden and his eyebrow-raise-hand-wave friend make for the water almost immediately with their boogie boards and the dogs in tow, and Kevin rounds up two teams for beach volleyball. Andrew opts to stay behind and watch the surfers fall into the waves, which somehow turns into helping Rosie and Lila build a sandcastle. Lila is more hindering than helping but Rosie is very patient with her, and the two of them toddle around looking for shells to put on the turrets, leaving Andrew with strict instructions from Rosie about digging a moat around the castle.

He concentrates on the feeling of the cool sand on his hot skin, checking that everyone’s still in his line of sight every once in a while. Kevin is shirtless, though covered in a chalky white mess of sunscreen and far too invested in the little game they’ve got going to be really attractive. Neil and Aaron seem intent on making each other fall face-first into the sand as often as possible, Katelyn isn’t half bad but her focus keeps getting drawn away by the girls, Allison is vicious and Dan is trying her best to keep both teams in some semblance of order.

Inevitably, the game devolves and falls apart. Some of the group go swimming while the rest set up to tan, nap or read under the umbrella Matt set up. Andrew feels like a cork bobbing loosely on the waves, not really part of anything but still, somehow, tethered to the group. Rosie comes over to show him a crab shell she found and Andrew suggests putting it in the sandcastle moat to protect the castle.

“There are jellies, too,” she tells him very seriously. “You shouldn’t step on them. Where’s your sun hat?”

“I don’t have one,” Andrew says, and she frowns.

“That’s no good. You need a sun hat.”

She stalks off, weaving through the maze of blankets to look for a spare hat and waking several people from their nap. Lila tries to crawl after her but isn’t fast enough and starts crying, though she gets scooped up almost immediately by Matt, who seems to be the resident baby whisperer.

Aaron drops down beside Andrew with two baskets of overpriced fries, wordlessly handing him one. They sit in silence for a while, eating their fries and looking out over the water, where Neil, Seth and Kevin are ruthlessly dunking and splashing each other.

“I suppose you want to know about mom,” Aaron finally says, trying and failing to wipe his greasy fingers off on the wet sand.

“Not particularly,” Andrew says.

“Right,” Aaron says, slumping a little, though from relief or disappointment Andrew can’t tell. “I guess she wasn’t much. But she was something.”

“Not to me,” Andrew says. He looks at the smooth skin of Aaron’s arms, freckled and dusted with sun-bleached hair, free of scars.

_Visible_ scars, he reminds himself.

“So, uh,” Aaron says. “Do you have a… partner?”

The little hesitation and the gender-neutral word choice make Andrew wonder if Neil told him that he found Andrew in a gay bar, or even that Andrew propositioned him. Maybe Aaron, accomplished surgeon with a picture-perfect family, felt a momentary disappointment at hearing that his long-lost twin brother wastes his time pouring drinks and hooking up with strangers at night and sleeping the days away.

It doesn’t matter, Andrew tells himself. If Aaron had higher hopes than this, then that is his problem, not Andrew’s.

“No,” he says, flicking his fingers dismissively. “I don’t date.”

“Right, cool,” Aaron grits out valiantly. “I mean, cool. Not that… Like, it would have been fine. Either way.”

He waves his hand, then seems to run out of words altogether. Andrew wills Neil to come abandon his mission of drowning Kevin in the sea and save him from the conversation, but it’s Katelyn who comes over instead, with a spare sun hat made out of straw.

“Here,” she says, “Rosie is worried you’ll get sunstroke if you don’t wear this.”

“Thanks,” Andrew says drily.

“Aaron burns really easily, so I assume you’re the same,” Katelyn continues, offering her sunscreen to him. Andrew declines and she doesn’t press the issue, taking care to rub some into her exposed arms.

“I’m glad you came,” she says after a moment. “The girls seem to like you.”

“Fuck knows why,” Andrew mutters, but Katelyn only laughs and gets out her book.

Time rolls by in waves. Seconds lap gently at Andrew’s bare toes and before he knows it the tide of an entire afternoon has pulled out from under his feet, leaving the sky a dry orange speckled with blueish clouds like stranded jellyfish and seashells. He walks around in the shallows with Rosie for a bit while she collects bits of driftwood and sea glass, but he doesn’t wade in any further—never learned how to swim as a child, never really saw the point of it later in life. Rosie abandons him in favour of the sandwiches Katelyn brought and Andrew pulls himself out of the water and walks further along the dirt sand until he finds Neil, perched on a rock with a sprawling view of the sunset.

“Hey,” Neil says as Andrew climbs up and settles down next to him. “Alright?”

Andrew nods and peers over the edge. It’s not a long drop, but it sets his stomach frothing like the water below and he pulls his feet back onto the rock, loosely wrapping his arm around his knees.

He kind of wants to ask about Neil’s scars, but he doesn’t. Just watches the light slip over the smooth globe of his shoulder and tries to find meaning in the constellations of his freckles and moles. Neil doesn’t say anything, though he must be aware of Andrew staring—

Andrew should stop staring.

“I think I prefer sunrises over sunsets,” Neil says, buttery-soft and relaxed under Andrew’s eyes even though he never asked for this, never asked for Andrew’s attention. “Getting up early, going for a run, everything’s empty and quiet… there’s something anticipatory about it, something so full of potential. Whereas sunsets are always bittersweet—another day ending, another lonely night ahead.”

“They don’t have to be lonely,” Andrew says, unthinking.

“No?”

Andrew shrugs.

“Surely you could find someone to spend them with.”

Neil’s mouth flicks sideways like a moth’s wing. It’s neither a smile nor a frown, but there’s something unhappy about it all the same.

“Maybe,” he mutters, looking down at his scarred hands, and Andrew doesn’t know what to say to that.

They sit there until Neil starts to shiver and Andrew’s ass goes numb from the hard rock. When they go back Renee is already distributing blankets and Katelyn and the girls have gone to get everyone hot chocolates. Aaron is scowling at a red patch on his chest where he must have forgotten to apply sunscreen, dabbing aloe gel on it while Matt jokes that it looks like the outline of a bra. Allison and Renee are sharing a large pizza and Allison starts feeding Neil slices without pausing in her conversation with Dan. Jean is throwing sticks for the dogs further down the beach, and Seth and Kevin are involved in a complicated looking game of Frisbee with the teenagers that involves a lot of showy jumping and diving.

Neil passes a pizza slice along to Andrew. Aaron catches his gaze just as he bites into it and he _knows_ , without being able to say why, that Aaron knows that Andrew knows he’s just made a mistake.

“Lactose, huh?” Aaron mutters under his breath. He must see something in Andrew’s expression because he shrugs and says, “Yeah, never stops me either.”

Andrew contemplates picking the cheese off, but he’s already had three ill-advised scoops of ice-cream today because sorbet just isn’t going to cut it, and one slice of pizza isn’t going to change the fact that he’ll probably need to visit the distant line of port-a-potties soon.

He crams the rest of the slice into his mouth without breaking eye contact with Aaron, who looks a bit like he just swallowed it himself.

Maybe having a twin is more fun than Andrew thought.

-

“Never Have I Ever is like a fine wine,” Allison declares, expertly twisting the plastic shot glasses as she lines them up so they stick in the damp sand. “It gets better with age. After all, the older you are the more scandalous things you’ve done.”

“Speak for yourself,” Dan says. “I’m done with the scandalous things. They take far too much energy once you’re over thirty.”

“You are an angel, it’s true,” Matt hums, kissing her cheek. She’s leaning against him with his arm around her middle, her skin aglow with the last dregs of light from the sunset.

“Oh, my dear, darling, sweet Danielle,” Allison smirks, shaking her head. Her hair is so long and sleek it looks like a mermaid’s tail, draped artfully over her shoulder. Andrew caught her spritzing it with some sort of after sun spray earlier, but she just raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow at him and offered him the bottle.

Andrew doesn’t want to know how much a single pump of it costs but it does smell nice, and his own hair now feels loose and soft where it’s starting to dry. If he could afford stuff like this he’d probably buy it too.

“We are making a concession to adulthood, anyway,” Renee pointedly reminds Allison, passing her a few bottles from the cooler. “Since some of us have to drive back and there are children present.”

The children present are long since conked out in the backseat of Katelyn’s car and Jaden and Ezra have yet to return from their own pizza run, but no one complains about the fact that Allison is doling out shots of something poisonously neon green and decidedly non-alcoholic.

“What she means is that half of us are recovering addicts and shouldn’t be drinking anyway,” Seth translates, more amused than antagonistic.

“Don’t let this stuff fool you,” Allison says, a smile like a fish hook on her mouth, “this stuff is vile.”

Andrew cautiously sniffs his own shot. It smells like carbonated nuclear waste with at least three different kinds of sugar added in. Some of the others are pulling faces, except for Neil, whom Andrew has seen eating a cold hot dog bun with only ketchup, three slices of Matt’s watermelon with chilli, several of Rosie’s sticky, half-melted sour gummy worms, a leftover waffle cone filled with tartar sauce, and a scoop of sour lime sorbet all in quick succession today. The only logical conclusion Andrew can draw from this is that he doesn’t have any taste buds at all, at least none that are functional, and that his opinions about lemonade are purely for argument’s sake.

“Ready?” Allison says, sitting cross-legged on Renee’s towel and relishing the sight of their lopsided, anticipatory circle. “I’ll go first. Never have I ever…”

It starts out relatively tame. Andrew only has to take two shots but his tongue is already tingling violently from the drink, in a way that makes him think it will probably be bright green in the morning. There’s a brief squabble about whether Kevin pulling an all-nighter in the university library and not noticing that it was already closed counts as breaking and entering, then Allison declares that it’s Andrew’s turn.

“Never have I ever,” he says, glancing around the circle and locking eyes with Neil’s for a moment, “kissed anyone present.”

There’s a brief pause, then every single person in the circle aside from Andrew downs their shot.

“Wow, homerun,” Katelyn giggles. Andrew doesn’t miss the way Aaron ducks in to steal a kiss when he thinks no one else is looking.

“Okay, but even discounting all the couples,” Allison says. “Is there a single soul here who hasn’t kissed Neil at least once?”

“Is that your next one?” Matt grins, raising his shot glass in a mock toast. “Never have I ever kissed Neil?”

“Guys,” Neil says warningly. Andrew deliberately keeps his head turned away from him, yet he still knows exactly what Neil looks like in that moment: sun-warmed and windswept and salt-kissed, his eyes cool and minerally, glimmering like the depths of a stalactite cave.

“No, no, let’s do this,” Allison says, picking up her shot glass and clacking it against Matt’s. “Bottoms up, everyone.”

Again, the entire circle minus Andrew drinks, and Allison cackles madly above the chorus of low, flustered laughter.

“Neil, you slag,” she croons fondly, ruffling his hair. “I had my suspicions but it’s nice to see it confirmed. This is going to settle a few outstanding bets. Let’s see, I know you and Kevin were a caffeine-fuelled midnight mistake while studying for exams—though for the record, personally I’m still not convinced it wasn’t a secret on-and-off thing for a while, the way they kept obsessing over each other back then.”

Kevin splutters, but Neil just rolls his eyes.

“Neil and I tried making out at a cheerleader party but we both agreed it wasn’t working for us, and Aaron did it because I dared him,” Katelyn offers merrily. Aaron mimes retching next to her, and Neil kisses his middle finger and waves it at him.

Allison stabs her sharply manicured fingernail further down the row.

“Matt?”

“A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell,” Matt sniffs.

“I wanted to know if I was gay,” Neil volunteers with a sheepish shrug. “The kiss was nice, but the evidence was inconclusive.”

“And I assume Dan was the control group?” Allison asks, amused.

“Yup,” Dan says cheerfully. “Was a very fine kiss, I regret nothing.”

“Hear hear,” Allison cackles. “He is rather a good kisser, isn’t he? My little baby boy.”

She hooks an arm around Neil and tips him against her side as he laughs. Andrew drops his gaze down to the sand and finds a stick to scratch around in it, drawing mindless swirls and erasing them again.

“Okay, so-” Allison tries, but Neil clears his throat loudly and throws another “Never have I ever” into the group, effectively derailing the conversation. After a few more rounds, Katelyn falls asleep against Aaron’s side and Renee puts her foot down, and they gather up their stuff, collect Jaden and Ezra where they’re having a chocolate chilli ice cream eating contest, and futilely try to shake the sand out of their clothes before climbing back into their cars. Neil goes so far as to pour out the last of his water over his feet, meticulously rubbing them dry with his towel before tucking them into the footrest of the passenger seat in Andrew’s car.

Kevin falls asleep the minute Andrew pulls out of the parking lot and Neil shares a wry smile with Andrew, turning his head to watch the passing lights of the others. He switches through the radio stations until he finds something mellow and old-fashioned, leaves it on with the volume low, his head perched on his hand.

“So,” Neil says after a couple of songs go by in comfortable silence, “now you know.”

“Know what?”

“What terrible dorks we are,” Neil says dryly, tilting his face to look at him in the dark. It’s hard to read his expression out of the corner of Andrew’s eye, but there’s a question lurking in the shadowed corners of his words.

“I suppose,” Andrew says when the silence stretches too thin.

Neil yawns into his elbow and shakes his head like one of Allison’s dogs.

“Still want to hang out with us?” he teases, but it only comes out sounding sort of hopeful.

“Not like I have any other long-lost twin brothers to choose from, is it?”

“That you know of,” Neil says, cheek dimpling in a passing flash of headlights. “There could be hundreds of you out there. An entire clone army. You don’t know.”

“Joke’s on whoever cloned us then. Aaron unironically says _cool beans_ and I can’t even get out of bed in the morning,” Andrew snorts.

“It would take ridiculous amounts of ice-cream to sustain you as well,” Neil chimes in. “An army of Kevins or Dans would be much more efficient.”

“Who would win, though?” Andrew muses. “If they had to fight each other?”

“The Dans,” Neil says immediately. “The Kevins would start arguing amongst themselves and dissolve into a panic.”

“What about zombies,” Andrew says.

“We don’t need an army against zombies,” Neil says. “We have Renee.”

They spend the rest of the ride spinning various apocalyptic eventualities between them, from zombies to aliens to ghosts, from nuclear war to climate change to pandemics, assembling teams of who they’d find the most useful to have around in each scenario. It takes near-drastic measures to wake Kevin up when they reach his house, and then Andrew drops Neil off and drives himself home with sand in his shoes and the faint saltwater smell of the ocean still clinging to everything.

-

“Cute redhead is back,” Roland says, motioning with his chin. “The one you disappeared with a couple weeks ago. Think he wants sloppy seconds?”

“No,” Andrew says, dropping a syrup bottle back in its drawer with a clang. He finishes the cocktail, ignores the hurt look on the guy’s face when he unceremoniously drops it before him—they’d been subtly flirting before Andrew knew Neil was here, but that’s not an option anymore now.

“What do you want?” Andrew says when he reaches Neil’s spot at the end of the bar.

“Oh, uh,” Neil says, “just water?”

“Just water,” Andrew repeats. Neil blinks slowly at him. Andrew grabs a bottle without taking his eyes away from Neil and plonks it down on the counter without so much as a napkin, the cool glass perspiring under his warm hands.

“So, I was wondering,” Neil says. “What’s your Hogwarts house?”

“What’s my—what are you, twelve?” Andrew scoffs.

“Actually I didn’t read the books until I was twenty-four,” Neil says. “I think you’re a Hufflepuff, for the record. And I’m usually pretty spot-on about these things.”

“Did you seriously come here to play Sorting Hat?”

“No,” Neil says. “I was just… in the neighbourhood.”

He waves his hand around vaguely. As they catch the light, Andrew can see that they’re angry red and chapped, and he catches one of Neil’s arms by the sleeve and drags it closer for inspection.

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” Neil says. Andrew shoots him a look and he relents: “I deep-cleaned my oven and forgot to wear gloves, it’s no big deal.”

Andrew sighs through his nose and lets go of his sleeve. He finds the vat of jasmine-scented hand cream by the sink that Roland always buys and drops it down in front of Neil with a pointed glare before moving down the bar to take the next orders, watching Neil out of the corner of his eye while he prepares the drinks. Neil obediently squirts a massive amount of cream into his hands and makes a valiant effort at rubbing it in before discreetly wiping off the excess on a napkin.

Neil sticks around until the end of Andrew’s shift, making his way through the water bottle and the complimentary bowl of chips Andrew tops up for him every once in a while. He doesn’t try to engage Andrew in further conversation and just sits there, staring into space with glassy eyes. Roland keeps shooting Andrew looks that Andrew pointedly ignores, and by the time the graveyard part of the night rolls around it seems Neil is half asleep on his barstool, head pillowed on his arms.

Andrew tidies up behind the bar while Roland sweeps up the haphazard debris of the night. Neil’s tired, half-lidded eyes follow Andrew’s path like vapour trails.

“Want me to drive you home?” Andrew asks when he’s done, shrugging into his jacket.

“Mm. Can you teach me the bottle opener trick some time,” Neil mumbles, stirring slowly and swaying as he slides off his chair.

“You need a little more hand-eye coordination than this,” Andrew tells him. Neil blinks at him, grabbing the bar for support, and Andrew nearly offers his hand instead. “Come on.”

Neil doesn’t object to being bundled into Andrew’s car. He half curls, half hunches into himself, reminding Andrew of a spider with its legs folded inwards. It doesn’t look comfortable and for a moment, Andrew wonders what Neil is trying to punish himself for.

He doesn’t ask, but he makes sure Neil staggers successfully inside after he drops him off, and waits for a light to switch on in one of the dark windows before making his own way home.

-

For a while, everything goes back to normal. Andrew works at the bar, sleeps most days, goes to the gym, goes to therapy, trudges his way through a book he picked up in a charity shop. Except now sometimes his phone chimes with a random thought from Neil or a picture of Rosie and Lila doing something stupid and ridiculous, captioned with single emojis or apt one-liners from Aaron. On his next night off he goes out for burgers with Aaron, Matt and Seth, and they end up walking around town after dark, trying to find the most hideous wedding dress in the window displays for when Matt finally pops the question to Dan.

“ _If_ he does, the fuckin’ pussy,” Seth says, taking a swig from his bottle of shitty beer that he’s not supposed to have but does anyway. He’s a contrary man; loud and abrasive, every fibre of him imbued with the strong liquor of pride, but Matt says the years have mellowed him considerably.

“Actually, if you’re going to compare him to a set of genitals, it would probably be more accurate to call him a gonad. Do you even have any idea how tough pussies are?” Aaron says. He’s sober, but he’s smoking a guilty cigarette and keeps reminding everyone that he’s not a smoker, which judging by Matt’s fond eye-roll and Seth’s snort is a regular occurrence.

“ _You’re_ a cunt,” Seth tells him, and they shove each other around until Aaron nearly crashes into Andrew. For a moment, Andrew can feel the warmth radiating from him, smell the acrid smoke and the onion rings on his breath. His hand shoots out without conscious thought, grabbing Aaron’s arm and steadying him just before they collide.

The shockwaves of it still send panic shooting up through the cracks in him like weeds. Andrew breathes, stamping them down, but the damage is done.

Aaron bends away from him, lazily shoving his middle finger at Seth.

“Guys,” Matt says from a little further down the street. He’s standing in front of a shop window, close enough that his breath is almost fogging up the glass. Andrew peers inside at the mannequin standing in pride of place, wreathed in vintage lace from collar to toe with a leather jacket draped over its shoulders and clunky Doc Martens on its feet.

“Classy,” Seth snorts. Aaron shushes him. Matt stares at the rebel bride for a while longer, looking pensive.

“I should ask her,” he says. “Shouldn’t I?”

“Uh, yes,” Aaron says dryly. “It’s been fucking forever, Boyd.”

“Fuck,” Matt breathes.

“Pussy,” Seth sing-songs.

“What if she says no,” Matt says. “She always said she doesn’t care about getting married.”

“She said no the first five times you asked her out too, didn’t she? But she came around in the end,” Aaron points out. Something in Andrew twists painfully, like a limb rotated at a slightly off angle.

“Yeah, but,” Matt sighs. “That was different. She had legitimate concerns, but she made it clear she was gonna say yes if we managed to work through them.”

The discomfort lingers in Andrew’s bones despite the words. It’s not the same. He knows it’s not the same. But the limb has been twisted, and he’s only just dealt with the weeds, and he probably shouldn’t have had that whisky earlier.

Aaron continues to gently counsel Matt through his momentary breakdown while Seth, always the agent of chaos, eggs him on. Andrew stuffs his hands in his pockets and looks up at the night sky, grappling eyes trying to find purchase on a familiar constellation.

“Speaking of pussies,” Seth’s voice rummages around the underbrush of Andrew’s thoughts, leaving snapped twigs in its wake. “What’s up with Neil and Doe here? The sexual tension is killing me.”

“Gross,” Aaron laughs. Then: “Shit. No. Really?”

His head twists around to look at Andrew.

“No way,” Matt says. “Neil doesn’t do sexual tension. What are you on about?”

Seth rolls his eyes.

“No, fuck, Seth’s right,” Aaron groans. “Neil doesn’t do sexual tension, but he gets these like, really intense fixations on people. Remember she-who-must-not-be-named? Existential hyperfocus is how he flirts. It’s rare, but it happens. And it’s _happening_.”

“It is not,” Andrew tries to tell them, but no one is listening.

“It’s so pathetic to watch, man,” Seth cackles. “I never know if it’s funny or sad.”

“Crap, of course. How did I miss this?” Aaron laments. “Of course he had to pick my twin brother, just to make things extra awkward for everyone involved.”

The word _misunderstanding_ rises like bile in Andrew’s throat. It’s what they told him the one time he dared to speak up about—

But it was a long time ago, and he won’t be like them. Neil made it clear that first time that he wasn’t interested in Andrew like that, and Andrew isn’t going to push it.

“There is nothing between Neil and me,” he says, loud, definite, “and there won’t ever be.”

The silence has a slightly stunned quality to it. Matt looks sad, Seth has one eyebrow raised, the piercings in it glinting in the light. Aaron looks relieved, or angry, or both.

Matt finally bursts the bubble with, “Anyone want ice-cream?” and they find a little cart outside the mall offering strawberry and vanilla soft-serve ice-cream dipped in melted chocolate. It’s a sweet-sour burst on Andrew’s tongue, the sprinkles crackling under his teeth, the chocolate half-hardened from the cold ice-cream. He takes a deep breath of lukewarm night air and lets it go.

-

“You look like a man who has good taste,” Allison Reynolds greets him. Fuck knows how she got his phone number—bullied it out of Neil, probably—but here she is, calling him at ass o’clock in the afternoon.

“It’s three p.m. you dramatic bitch,” Allison says, laughing when he points out that that is basically five in the morning for him on a work night. “Anyway, I’m outside, we’re going shopping. I don’t trust Neil to dress himself for his job interview.”

Neil hadn’t mentioned a job interview and Andrew doesn’t usually take issue with his clothes, but the way Allison says it makes him think she might be largely responsible for that. She hangs up before Andrew can ask her however, and he spends a few minutes contemplating whether he should just let her rot in her fancy car outside, if she’s even there. In the end, though, he drags himself out of bed, swishes some mouthwash while throwing on clothes, and slips into the passenger seat of the gleaming Porsche idling in the driveway of his apartment building.

Sunglasses obscure most of Allison’s face. She looks polished as ever, gold jewellery dripping down from her wrists, neck and ears, the simple white spaghetti top and black high-waist shorts a stark contrast. Her nails are painted in a rich, sunset gradient of ice-cream colours and she’s blowing chewing gum bubbles as she drives, letting them pop and starting over. The stereo is blasting something that could be at home at Eden’s. Andrew doesn’t complain.

Heat is pounding the pavement when they get out of the car. Andrew can feel sweat beading under his arms just from the short walk to the mall, where blissfully cool air envelops them as soon as they step through the revolving doors. Still Allison doesn’t speak, just leads them on a precarious Easter egg hunt through the building, pawing through clothes racks just to discard and abandon them midway through, blowing bubbles and blowing bubbles and blowing bubbles.

After about an hour of this, Andrew is sick of the aimless wandering and veers left into the food court. He buys two bubble teas and sits at a corner table, ignoring Allison’s glares, until she finally plops herself down across from him and snatches up her tea. After a moment she slides her sunglasses up into her hair and Andrew can see that her eyes are red, though if there are dark rings or puffiness underneath them she’s covered it up expertly with make-up.

“I used to shoplift here,” she says, out of nowhere. She noisily slurps up a boba pearl through her straw as if defying anyone to call her out on it, but they’re alone in their corner, the bustle of the mall a distant, muffled sound, like music from another room.

“Why did you stop?” Andrew asks.

Allison shrugs.

“It got boring, my parents stopped caring,” she says dismissively. “Renee once gave me this whole talk about how shoplifting only harms the employees, but to be honest, I didn’t care.”

“I used to steal police cars,” Andrew admits. “Drive them around a bit, then leave them in a ditch somewhere and hitchhike back. Got caught eventually, of course, but it was better than the alternative.”

Allison stares at him for a moment, then throws her head back and laughs.

“You know, when Aaron first went on about having a brother, I was sure the whole thing would crash and burn if we ever found you,” she says thoughtfully once she’s calmed down, scratching her straw around the bottom of her glass. “But you actually fit right in. Who’d have thought?”

“Must be the fuck-up gene,” Andrew retorts. “It’s much more widespread than people assume.”

“Mm,” Allison says, her mouth curling up into a grin like paper catching fire. “Must be.”

She buys them a thing of sushi that Andrew thinks is actually meant for at least four people. Allison only picks away at it while Andrew eats most of the rest, and then she drags him through another couple of stores until she finally finds what she’s looking for with zero input from Andrew. After, she drives him home again, dumps one of the bags in his lap and says, “Let’s do this again some time,” through the open window before peeling away from the curb like a madwoman pursued by the devil.

Andrew peers at the soft sweater inside the bag. It’s black, with a pattern of lit-up windows printed on it like a row of buildings at night, a thin, curved sliver of moon perched among the star-dotted fabric near the collar. There’s a button-up shirt that goes with it and a pair of loose cotton pants that are so different from the tight skinny jeans Andrew normally wears that he’s intrigued despite himself.

Underneath all that, he finds a pair of black socks with yellow cat eyes staring out at him.

He can’t say he hates it.

-

“I need a date,” Neil announces, standing outside his door and fidgeting with his shirt cuffs. He looks uncomfortable and shifty, kind of like a little kid needing to go to the bathroom very badly.

“A date for what,” Andrew says, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. What is it with these people and waking him up at ungodly hours of the day?

“My uncle is hosting one of his stuffy, boring garden parties,” Neil says. “I skipped out on the last three, so he’s threatening to call my mom if I don’t go to this one.”

“And this is my problem how?”

“Well,” Neil mumbles, clearing his throat and shifting his weight from one leg to the other. “I had to come up with a good enough reason not to go to the other ones, so I told him I had a boyfriend. And when I tried it this time he said to just invite my non-existent boyfriend along and wouldn’t hear anything else about it.”

Andrew squints through the fog in his brain.

“Why not ask Kevin or one of the others?”

Neil makes a face.

“My uncle has seen or met all of them before; he’d know I was lying. To be honest, he probably already knows, he just wants to prove a point.”

“So you’re asking me,” Andrew reiterates, “to be your date to your uncle’s garden party?”

“There’s food,” Neil cajoles, switching from sheepish to pliant and pleading so fast that Andrew knows it’s an act. “And all we have to do is make an appearance, stuff our faces with appetisers, and make sure a few people see us sneaking off somewhere private so they’ll assume we got carried away.”

Andrew considers telling him no, he really does. But the image of sneaking off somewhere private with Neil and getting carried away is too powerful, like a heavy perfume.

“And if he thinks I’m Aaron and you just made up the part about Aaron having a twin?”

Neil looks at him, baffled.

“You’re nothing alike. I mean, yeah, in some ways, but. It’ll be obvious you’re not Aaron.”

“Fine,” Andrew hears himself say, “but I’ll drive.”

“I was hoping you’d say that,” Neil grins, lopsided and cheeky. “My car’s still in the garage.”

Andrew frowns.

“How did you get here, exactly?”

“It’s a long story,” Neil says, far too cheerfully for something that probably involves hitchhiking across town and crossing five lanes of rush-hour traffic and a bit of highway to get to Andrew’s apartment building. “Look, I’m not saying we have no leeway concerning a fashionably late entrance, but you should probably get dressed.”

Andrew looks down at his tank top and rubs a hand over his face. He parks Neil in his kitchen, sticking his head into all of his cupboards and riffling through the drawers while Andrew takes a quick shower and puts on a random assortment of clothes that may or may not be appropriate for Neil’s uncle’s garden party. He settles for a pair of light linen slacks and a short-sleeved button-down in a dark blueish green that matches the green accents in Neil’s shirt, which is embroidered in a small, plantsy pattern and has little cheeky red buttons that Andrew kind of wants to spend time teasing out of their buttonholes one by one.

Neil is quiet on the drive over. He keeps rubbing at a dry patch on the back of his hand like a nervous tic, but it’s not like Andrew can tell him everything will be fine. All he knows is that Neil is on reluctant speaking terms with his mother’s side of the family, who supported him through college and gave him a guilt complex on top for free.

“Neil,” Andrew says once he’s killed the engine. The sun is bright and relentless like a migraine, holding the world in its grip, and Andrew relishes the cold air from the AC before they have to leave the car. “What will they be expecting?”

“Oh,” Neil says, blinking himself back from a faraway place, like a bumblebee drifting into an open window. “Nothing, really. They’re not exactly big on PDA, if that’s what you mean.”

Andrew relaxes a fraction.

“Uncle Stuart will try to subtly find out how much money you make, but he’s not so crass as to actually ask outright. Let’s just hope no one tells my mom.”

He doesn’t explain what he means by that exactly, but Andrew doesn’t have time to ask. He grabs the bottle of ridiculously overpriced wine that Neil bought on the way over so Andrew wouldn’t show up empty-handed, not his uncle’s favourite but still fancy enough to slide in his good graces without seeming over-prepared. They go up a flight of steps so white they remind Andrew of bleached teeth and someone lets them into the house. Neil walks straight through to the garden on the other side, circling around a greenhouse filled with exotic-looking flowers to a carefully pruned English rose garden, where his uncle is holding court.

“Well, well, look who’s honouring us with his presence,” Stuart Hatford says without a drop of fondness.

“Spare me the lecture. This is Andrew,” Neil says. His accent coalesces into something stiff and precise, mimicking his uncle’s. “You didn’t invite Mary, did you?”

“No,” Stuart says, amused. He’s still examining Andrew with a dark intensity in his green eyes. His hair is grey and his face is longer and more angular than Neil’s, but there’s a certain echo in how they move around each other and in their stature, marking them as related nonetheless.

Andrew doesn’t say, “Pleasure to meet you,” or any other meaningless platitude that would only come out as a lie. Stuart comments briefly on his wine choice and aims a few empty pleasantries at an unresponsive Neil, but Neil manages to extricate them both under cover of a couple of elderly ladies asking after the roses and they make their way to the buffet laid out in the shade at the bottom of the garden. Andrew watches Neil pile two plates with an excessive amount of finger sandwiches cut into triangles, tea cakes, mini berry tartlets, tuna balls, cheese and grape bites, and candied violets. He stops him before he can add some of the lavender Earl Grey infused shortbread to the pile.

“I thought you didn’t like Earl Grey,” Andrew reminds him. Neil looks down at the piece of shortbread in his hand and tosses it into the nearby ornamental pond without batting an eye.

“I don’t,” he says. “Let’s find somewhere to sit.”

He steers them through the garden until they find a spindly bench away from the main cluster of guests but visible enough that they can still be seen. Neil polishes off his plate in record time, eating sweet and savoury things indiscriminately, looking like he barely tastes what’s on his tongue. Even Andrew, who grew up without the luxury of being picky, can’t really stomach the thought of eating the tuna balls with the candied violets. He dumps the little cheese skewers and the cream cheese sandwiches on Neil’s plate in exchange for his cake, because he doesn’t fancy having to find a place to fart in peace without any of the guests or the security cameras breathing down his neck, and Neil eats them without complaint.

“Do you want to leave?” Andrew asks, because Neil’s eyes keep swarming the exits. He’s so much more contained than usual; not even his leg is bouncing, and it feels profoundly wrong. Like this place is an ill-fitting suit Neil is forcing himself to wear.

“Sorry,” Neil says, shaking his head. “Guess I’m being a terrible boyfriend, huh?”

“Yes,” Andrew says seriously. “I’m still waiting for you to ravish me behind the greenhouse.”

“I could be planning to ravish you behind the greenhouse,” Neil smirks, thawing a little. “You don’t know.”

“Well, the sooner you get on with it, the sooner we can leave.”

“I’ve been told anticipation is a turn-on,” Neil hums, pushing the empty skewers into a neat pile on his plate.

“You’ve been told?” Andrew echoes.

Neil seems to lose his nerve, though. He mumbles something about giving Andrew a tour and they tromp through the garden for a while, Neil occasionally throwing out the names of flowers or stiffly acknowledging other guests and family members but never staying around for long.

“I didn’t know you had a British accent,” Andrew tells him on their second circuit of the rose garden.

“Oh, I can do several of them,” Neil grins, though it looks somewhat humourless. “My uncle only actually lives here for a few weeks each year. I mostly grew up in a draughty manor in the English countryside. Homeschooled and everything. Didn’t really get out much until I decided that I wanted to stay here and go to college. Being the resident posh British lad got very old very quickly though, and I’ve always been good at mimicking accents, so I decided to blend in a bit more. It’s kind of second nature now.”

“What other accents can you do?” Andrew asks, curious.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Neil teases.

“Yes,” Andrew just says, and somehow they spend an admittedly entertaining half hour hiding amid the fragrant roses with Andrew throwing out increasingly specific accents and Neil proving his aptitude at them by reciting random poems or pretending to have a conversation and voicing all the different parties involved. In the end, though, he goes back to his regular, ineffably all-American one, and Andrew has to remind himself that he’s not actually here as Neil’s boyfriend and PDA is frowned upon in the Hatford family even if he could foolishly lean in and steal a kiss right now.

“Which languages do you speak?” he asks instead, plucking petals off the roses until Neil flicks at his hand to stop.

“Uh, let’s see,” Neil says, distracted by Andrew’s thieving fingers trying to sneak past him again. “German, French, Russian, Hebrew, Portuguese, some Spanish, some Italian, passable Finnish, very shoddy Mandarin. And my uncle forced me to learn Latin and some Ancient Greek until I put my foot down.”

Andrew manages to snag another rose petal just as Neil’s hand shoots out to stop him. Somehow their fingers become tangled up and they both freeze, the small shock of the sudden touch travelling up Andrew’s arm like a live wire.

“Sorry,” Neil says at the same time as Andrew tightens his fingers around Neil’s.

The moment hovers like the lazy insects in the sweet air around them, buzzing in Andrew’s ear. There’s a low grumble of thunder in the distance, like an animal being woken from its afternoon nap. The cloying scent of the roses is bunched around them in thick layers, mixed with the faint tang of ozone and baked earth.

A ladybird lands on Neil’s collar, flicking its wings. Slowly, Andrew reaches out to let it crawl onto his hand, but it flies off; leaving Andrew’s fingertips to lap at the warm shore of Neil’s jaw instead. He takes a breath and cups his hand around the jut of the bone, resting the heel of his palm against the heartbeat pounding in Neil’s throat.

He can feel more than hear Neil suck in a breath.

“Andrew,” Neil murmurs, “do you want to-”

A jarring voice calls out to them from the gate to the rose garden. Neil flinches and shoots to his feet, wild-eyed like the storm clouds in the sky, then he smooths down his shirt and his expression and walks away down the gravel path.

Andrew watches him go, not inclined to follow just yet. Instead he walks deeper into the maze of the rose garden, to the whimsical marble fountain in its heart. A swarm of mosquitoes hangs suspended above it, darkening the air. The next rumble of thunder sounds closer already and the breeze eddies restlessly around him, ruffling the flowers as it scurries past.

Someone clears their throat behind him and Andrew turns in time to see Neil’s uncle step around a bend in the path.

“I must admit I was surprised,” he says, stopping a respectable distance away from Andrew. “I was rather under the impression that my nephew, ah… had no greater interest in romance.”

Andrew endures the shrewd look Stuart sends him and doesn’t reply.

“Thank you for the wine,” Stuart goes on, and something in his tone makes Andrew think that he knows Neil’s the one who picked it out. “I fear this little get-together might be foiled by the weather any moment now, but I do hope you will join us again. If only for the pleasure of my nephew’s no doubt delightful company.”

There are a number of things Andrew feels like saying, but in the end he settles on the least confrontational option and merely inclines his head in acknowledgment. The thirteen failed therapists of his younger years must all be experiencing a peculiar itch at this precise moment.

The first raindrops fall. Stuart motions for Andrew to accompany him back up to the house, and Andrew manages to slip away in the throng of guests seeking shelter. He doesn’t see Neil anywhere in the conservatory they are herded into, nor in any of the immediate rooms or corridors beyond it, so he steps back outside onto the patio to check the garden once again.

Sure enough, Neil is jogging up the path with something cradled to his chest. He snags Andrew’s sleeve and tows him around the side of the house, towards the front and over to the car. Rain is pelting down furiously now and Andrew fumbles with his keys. They scramble into the car, breathless and wet, and Neil leans back against the seat and laughs.

“I saved the cakes,” he says, holding up a platter covered in a cloth napkin. Peeling it off, he reveals a mostly undamaged selection of tea cakes and a handful of sandwiches.

“Idiot,” Andrew tells him, but Neil just grins and grabs a sandwich. Andrew takes a slice of white chocolate cake and peers out at the blurry world.

“Wait five minutes,” Neil advises. “It’ll calm down.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Hey…”

“What?”

“Thanks for coming with me,” Neil says, looking studiously down at the last bite of his sandwich. “I… it was slightly less awful, with you.”

Andrew takes his time licking a smear of chocolate from his thumb.

“Does your uncle ever mean what he says?” he asks after a pause.

“No,” Neil huffs, “never. It’s a family disease. Everything is always wrapped in double layers of meaning and deception… My mom was the same. Is, I mean. We don’t really. Talk anymore.”

“Mothers are overrated,” Andrew says.

“I wanted to kiss you,” Neil blurts out. The non-sequitur takes a moment to find its way through the maze of Andrew’s thoughts. “In the garden, I mean,” Neil continues. “When you…”

He reaches up to ghost his fingers over where Andrew’s hand had been on his jaw less than twenty minutes ago. A skittish look lurks in his eyes, a deer ready to bolt at the slightest disturbance in the clearing.

Except they’re in a car in the pouring rain, and the world beyond that doesn’t exist.

“What about now?” Andrew asks.

“Yeah,” Neil says, nodding. “Now works.”

They regard each other for a moment. Then Andrew leans in and Neil leans in and Andrew puts his hand back on Neil’s jaw and Neil catches his other one in the spaces between his fingertips like before, and Andrew becomes buzzingly aware of the slightly sour aftertaste of the chocolate in his mouth and how damp and uncomfortably twisted in his seat he is and that some of the mosquitoes probably got to him after all, but none of that matters because Neil squeezes his fingers and then they’re kissing.

As erratic and twitchy as Neil usually is, kissing is a task he approaches with single-minded focus. His mouth is soft and insistent against Andrew’s, lips opening without hesitation, head tilting to find the perfect angle at which Andrew can learn to undo him. It’s like a cloudburst, sudden and all-consuming, soaking Andrew to the bone. All he can do is try to make sure Neil gets wet, too.

They kiss until the rain slows to a canter and the awareness that they’re still outside Neil’s uncle’s house starts to niggle at them again. Separating is a difficult affair, a tedious disentangling of fingers and tongues, mouths and eyes. Neil’s breath is coming in tiny puffs and he keeps straining after Andrew, seeking out one last press of lips. He leans his forehead against Andrew’s and tugs on his fingers, leading them up to his face so Andrew is cupping it in both hands.

“I don’t,” he says, swallowing. “If we go home, is this… are we going to…”

“What,” Andrew murmurs.

“I guess I just,” Neil says, “want to know if I should say goodbye. If this is all I can have.”

Andrew wipes his thumbs over the rabbit-soft skin under Neil’s eyes and opens his mouth, closes it again.

“What do you want?” he asks at last, though it feels like picking at a scab.

Neil swallows again. Andrew can feel his throat move under his hands.

“I’m not used to,” he mumbles, closing his eyes. “Wanting.”

“Me neither,” Andrew admits quietly. Neil’s mouth tugs faintly upwards at one end before flattening out again.

“Maybe we can figure it out together?”

Andrew prods at the scab again. Maybe there’s healed skin underneath.

He won’t know until it comes off.

“Yeah,” he says hoarsely, “maybe.”

“Then let’s go home,” Neil says, looking exhausted and scared and relieved all at the same time.

-

There’s a hickey on Andrew’s neck.

Andrew leans close to the mirror and presses on it, watching the colours shift. He’d meant to drive himself home after dropping Neil off at his apartment, but Neil had offered him a dry change of clothes, and while Andrew had been in the bathroom Neil had made tea and put the rest of the cakes on a plate and arranged them and himself on the sofa in such a tempting way that Andrew simply hadn’t left. They’d stayed there for hours, kissing the evening away, until the room was almost completely dark and everything had narrowed down to the spot on Andrew’s neck that Neil was suckling and thumbing and mouthing at.

They didn’t share Neil’s bed, but after an evening of making out and a night of sleeping in Neil’s things, on Neil’s couch, Andrew is infused head to toe with his smell. It’s kind of intoxicating. He takes another look in the mirror and perches the spare toothbrush he’s been using on the counter like a lopsided promise to come back.

Neil’s apartment is fastidiously clean, something which only becomes obvious when overlooking how untidy it is. There are empty cupboards in the kitchen and a cramped pile of half-open tea tins, cereal boxes, spaghetti packets and little bags of cat treats on the counter. Photographs are taped up haphazardly to the wall even though Andrew spots a few frames on the bookshelf, still in their plastic wrappers. The dishes are all done and stacked on the drying rack, but it looks as if there are several days’ worth of mugs under the plate they used last night. Neil’s laptop is buried underneath a tower of dictionaries and post-it notes are stuck one on top of the other, defeating their own purpose.

Andrew looks at the indent on the sofa where Neil’s cat slept most of the night and left behind a sizeable amount of ginger hair, but the rest of the apartment seems unreasonably free of the stuff.

The sound of the electric kettle must draw Neil out of his bedroom, because he shows up fully dressed just in time to accept the mug of tea Andrew made for him. He picked one of the tins from the counter at random and Neil doesn’t complain, just pads to the fridge and pours a glug of milk in it after giving it a cursory sniff.

“Do you want any breakfast?” he asks, swapping out Sir’s food for a fresh bowl while Sir winds unhelpfully around his legs.

“Are you offering?” Andrew asks, pointedly looking him up and down, but the innuendo either goes clean over Neil’s head or he deliberately ignores it.

“I can make eggs,” he hums, peering into the fridge again. “And a smoothie?”

“Why not,” Andrew says. He is momentarily wary of Neil’s cooking skills, remembering the odd things he eats sometimes, but both the strawberry and kiwi smoothie and the omelette Neil makes are perfectly acceptable. Neil clears everything away, rinses out the mixer and drops the pan in the sink before joining Andrew at the table to eat.

“Somehow I did not expect you to be such a neat freak,” Andrew remarks when Neil jumps up again a moment later to wipe up an overlooked dusting of paprika on the counter. Neil freezes, then rinses out the rag and drapes it over a towel rack to dry.

“My mom didn’t like messes,” he says stiffly. “Old habits die hard, I guess.”

Andrew thinks of the foster homes that were always squeaky clean on the outside to mask the filth within and doesn’t say anything.

-

Aaron calls him on a Tuesday morning. It’s Andrew’s therapy and gym day, and he’s just towelling off his hair in the locker room and taking stock of the newest bruises and aches when he sees his phone light up in his bag.

“Oh,” Aaron says when he picks up. “Hi. Sorry. I thought… I wasn’t sure if you’d be up.”

“It’s my day off,” Andrew tells him, sitting on the bench and shoving his feet in his shoes. It’s still too early to be up for him, truth be told, but the gym is much emptier at this time of day, and he had to get up for his therapist appointment anyway. It’s barely eleven and he already feels exhausted.

“Right,” Aaron says, something strained in his voice. A child starts crying in the background and Aaron sighs. “Sorry, Lila is… It’s the hay fever, I don’t blame her, it’s just… She’s been up screaming all night, you’d think she’d have tired herself out by now.”

He sounds tired, too. Andrew grabs his bag and makes his way to the exit, handing over the little padlock and key for the locker in exchange for his membership card at the front desk before he leaves.

“Do you want me to come over,” he says when Aaron is silent for too long. He’s not sure what else Aaron called him for, though Aaron still splutters quietly and hems and haws before he finally agrees. Andrew rolls his eyes and hangs up, already on his way to their house.

Aaron lets him in, carrying a fractious Lila in the crook of one arm. He looks terrible; blotchy and red-eyed and unshaven, his shirt stained with what Andrew assumes to be baby snot or applesauce or both. Andrew wordlessly holds his arms out and takes the damp, squirming, pink-faced bundle, toeing out of his shoes along the way.

“Thanks,” Aaron says stiffly, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “I just… Katelyn’s away for a conference and Rosie’s with her grandparents, on Katelyn’s side I mean, it’s not like we—anyway, I can’t seem to get her to stop crying.”

He looks almost ashamed as he says it, and Andrew tells him to go take a shower. There’s a half-empty jar of baby food on the kitchen table, though it looks like most of it’s ended up smeared across the table and even along the cupboards rather than in Lila’s mouth. Lila whines and blubbers unhappily in his arms when he offers her the spoon, so he dumps it in the trash, gives the table and cupboards a cursory wipe and finds some oat milk in the fridge to warm up for her instead.

The house is quiet as he settles on the large wicker chair in the living room and wraps Lila snug in a Winnie The Pooh fleece blanket, holding the bottle for her while she drinks, her eyes still crusty with tears. Dust motes dance in the sunlight coming in from the large windows, toys and dolls and crayons are strewn across the floor, an abandoned painting hangs off the edge of the coffee table. The dog is nowhere in sight, but from what Andrew knows Rosie is very attached to it, so she probably took it with her. Family photographs are lined up along a dresser and Andrew tears his eyes away from them, feeling strangely like an intruder.

By the time Aaron comes back, looking cleaner though no less tired, Lila has fallen asleep on Andrew’s chest. Aaron mimes a sarcastic prayer before picking at the surrounding debris for a bit, then he sinks onto the sofa with a stuffed moose and a topless Barbie doll in his hands.

Somehow, without either of them planning to, they both fall asleep.

Andrew wakes up about an hour later when Lila accidentally kicks him in the ribs. She whimpers, laboriously peeling herself from sleep, and Andrew gets up, jiggling her gently as he walks around. It’s no use, though; she wakes up with a cry, snot blubbering from her nose and down her chin and onto Andrew’s shirt.

“Dadaaa,” she sobs, fisting her hands in the snotty fabric and clinging to him.

“Get it together,” Andrew tells her. “It’s just snot. No need to make such a fuss.”

He grabs one of the soft, colourful little towels from the back of a chair and wipes it over her face, which makes her wail in displeasure, but at least she’s about eighty percent less snotty when he’s done.

“There, that’s better,” he hums. Her face feels a little warm, but not worryingly so; Andrew still wets another towel with cold water and drapes it over her forehead before filling a sippy cup with diluted apple juice and grabbing a few pretzels from the snack cupboard for her to gnaw on. The wet towel goes flying the moment she moves a bit more forcefully and he abandons that endeavour, settling back in the wicker chair with the sippy cup and the stuffed fox from the first time they met.

Aaron is awake, though he looks like he wishes he wasn’t. He watches Andrew with one eye open and huffs a snort of amusement when Lila spews a mouthful of apple juice over Andrew’s shirt as she sneezes.

“Yes, very funny,” Andrew says, feeling increasingly damp and resigned. “I’m sure what was on your shirt when I got here was much worse than this.”

Aaron shudders and pushes himself into a vaguely upright position, stretching until his back pops.

“You really don’t have to do this,” he says around a grimace.

“No, I’m doing it,” Andrew replies, amused. “This is a great opportunity to bond with my niece.”

Lila drops her sippy cup and Andrew’s hand shoots out to catch it.

“Nice,” Aaron comments.

“Bartender reflexes,” Andrew offers, spinning the cup in his hand before offering it back to Lila, who seems suitably impressed.

“Dada,” she says, thrusting the cup in Aaron’s direction. Then: “Dada doo.”

“I’m not your dada two,” Andrew tells her firmly, taking the cup from her again since she’s clearly done drinking from it and offering a pretzel instead. “Eat something for once instead of decorating your home with it, will you?”

Lila sticks the pretzel in her mouth, then throws it at the bookcase with abandon.

“Doo!”

“I think she means Drew,” Aaron says through muffled laughter.

“She does not,” Andrew says, offended.

“Dada doo,” Lila insists, and sneezes in his face.

-

Aaron starts inviting him over more often. Or more precisely, Katelyn does, though she will find excuses to leave them alone whenever she thinks they need a brotherly bonding session. Andrew wants to be annoyed but is mostly distracted by trying to beat the shit out of Aaron in Mario Kart.

One Sunday after lunch, Andrew has been sufficiently plied with spaghetti bolognese, garlic bread and takeaway tiramisu from Giovanni’s to agree to stay for a Skype call with Nicky. He helps Rosie put the finishing touches on her lego spaceship while Aaron gets the connection going and Nicky immediately launches into telling Aaron off for not calling him for so long, updating him on some Klose family drama, describing in minute detail what he had for dinner the night before, and asking after Katelyn and the girls. Aaron seems to be used to this and simply lets him talk himself out, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms behind his head, waiting patiently until he can finally get a word in edgewise.

“Actually, I wanted to introduce someone to you,” he says at last when Nicky is busy taking a sip of the hot chocolate his husband just brought him. Erik, a tall, blond beefcake of a man with a carefully styled beard and a man bun, gives a little wave before disappearing out of frame again.

“No way!” Nicky says. “Did you get another dog after all? I kept telling you—”

“No, actually,” Aaron interrupts him, gesturing for Andrew to come forward. Andrew stands beside Aaron’s chair and taps a little salute at the camera, and for a moment, the picture on the other end seems frozen. Then Nicky lets out an ear-splitting scream.

“Aaron Michael Minyard! Are you playing a prank on me? Did you actually figure out how to do that split frame thing just to mess with me?”

“I changed my mind,” Andrew tells Aaron. “I don’t want to meet your cousin.”

Nicky screams again.

“Papa?” a child’s voice says tentatively, out of sight of the camera. “ _Alles okay?_ ”

Nicky rushes to reassure them in gushy German and then gets up to walk three circles around his desk chair and snag a hug from a passing Erik, who doesn’t seem too concerned about his husband’s antics.

“Oh my god,” Nicky says breathlessly when he sits back down. “I can’t believe you just sprung that on me. Hi, I’m normal, I promise.”

“He’s always like this,” Aaron says immediately.

“Excuse you,” Nicky huffs. “You actually found your twin brother, who you didn’t even know existed until a few months ago, and you _forgot to tell me_ , and—”

“This is why I never call you,” Aaron tells him. “This and the time you forgot you made me do a year abroad in Germany back in high school and started dirty talking Erik in German _right in front of me_.”

“I _said_ I was sorry,” Nicky says, waving his hand dismissively. “Go, leave us, let the adults talk cousin to cousin.”

“You say that like I’m not the older twin,” Aaron says, amused.

“No,” Andrew says, “what? No.”

“Oh yes,” Aaron grins. “Didn’t I tell you?”

“You’re full of shit.”

“Am not. I can show you the records.”

“Shove off.”

Aaron laughs, but leaves the chair for Andrew and goes to make himself a cup of coffee while they talk.

“Make me one too,” Andrew shouts after him.

“Make your own!” Aaron shouts back.

“Incredible,” Nicky breathes when Andrew turns to the screen. “How long have you known each other?”

“Two months, five days, and about three hours, give or take,” Andrew says. It sounded funny in his head, but Nicky’s eyes just soften and grow damp.

“Oh,” he says. “Oh, I think I’m going to cry.”

Andrew looks around for Aaron or Katelyn, but even Rosie has left her legos behind and wandered outside. A family of traitors, the lot of them.

-

“What would you have done, that first night we met, if that’s what I’d been there for,” Neil asks him one moody afternoon, the sky cycling through black-purple-blue-yellow like a bruise in fast forward, hurricane warnings like police tape cordoning them off from the outside world. Eden’s is closed for the night and Andrew could still go home if he left now, but there’s the herculean effort that getting up and leaving Neil’s warm bed would require.

And now, that question. Like a hand pinning him down.

“If you’d wanted a hook-up, you mean?” Andrew says, blunting its edges on purpose. He turns on his side, mirroring Neil’s pose but keeping a little pocket of space between their bodies. The wind is whistling: less like a mouth, and more like a spray of bullets now.

“Yeah,” Neil says. He doesn’t blush or squirm, but there’s something almost bashful in his eyes. Andrew covers them with his hand before telling him.

“Oh,” Neil says when he’s done.

“Do you want that, Neil?” Andrew asks.

Neil snakes his hand out from underneath the blankets and pulls Andrew’s down to look at him.

“No,” he says truthfully. “Not really.”

“Then what do you want?”

Neil fiddles with Andrew’s fingers while he thinks about that. His mouth is pink and kiss-stung and there’s a good chance Andrew will discover a line of hickeys marching down the side of his neck the next time he looks in a mirror, so it’s safe to say that kissing is still on the table. Neil hasn’t initiated anything beyond that and Andrew is in no rush, but since Neil brought it up, he’s going to have to find and verbalise an answer before they can go back to the kissing.

“I’m not sure,” Neil finally admits, frowning. “I’ve tried some stuff before with people I trusted, but it’s not really something I do or...” He chews on his bottom lip as if chewing through the next words. “I, uh, I think about it. A lot. But I rarely ever want to do it with someone. I don’t know, that’s probably fucked up, but…”

“Thinking about it is safe,” Andrew says. It’s something he’s had to work out in therapy. “Trusting someone not to overstep your boundaries is not.”

“Yeah, that’s,” Neil says, “yeah. That. But thinking about it is also… enough? For me, anyway. I know it’s not, for other people.”

Andrew nods and laces their hands together, squeezing.

“We don’t have to do anything,” he says.

“No, I know,” Neil says, then sighs and rubs his face against the pillow before peering up at Andrew and muttering: “But I kind of want to try. Is that okay?”

“Yes,” Andrew says. “Now?”

“If you want.”

Andrew looks at him—still half-buried in the pillow, hair frizzy with static, bags under his eyes and worn shirt collar bent out of shape where Andrew’s been using it to reel him in for kisses. He tries to picture what it would be like if Neil were alone, if he was thinking about it and getting himself off, feeling safe without Andrew there to muddy things up.

“What do you think about, on your own?” Andrew asks.

“Oh, uh. You know.”

“I don’t. That’s why I’m asking.”

“Well, sex. I mean… What it would feel like. For someone else.”

“Elaborate,” Andrew demands.

“I like the idea of some things,” Neil admits, getting more comfortable again. “Even if I don’t think that it would actually do much for me in real life, it’s… I don’t know. It still turns me on.”

Andrew half-expects something incredibly kinky at this point. In for penny, he thinks and says: “Like what?”

“Um,” Neil says. “Like… getting a handjob. Mechanically it’s almost the same as masturbating, isn’t it? So, but, thinking about—about doing it with someone I really—doing it to them or having them do it to me, and feeling known and seen and, uhm… you’re laughing. Great.”

“I am not laughing,” Andrew says, only sounding slightly strangled.

“I bear my innermost soul to you and you laugh at me,” Neil sniffs dramatically, rolling onto his back. “How about _you_ tell me your sexual fantasies and we’ll see how stupid they are?”

“Alright,” Andrew agrees, maybe a little too easily. It feels right though, an equal exchange. In for a penny, and all that. “I fantasise about fucking men. I have never actually done it, and I don’t know if I ever will. Sometimes I think about it so much I go out and find a random guy just to get it over with, but I never go through with it. Even though I know, theoretically, what it would be like. I can imagine every single detail, every step of the way. But I can’t do it.”

“Oh,” Neil says after a pause, shifting onto his side again. “Okay. Thank you for telling me.”

“Do you still want to try?” Andrew asks, catching Neil’s little finger in his like a pinkie promise.

“Yes,” Neil murmurs, tugging on it until Andrew leans in for a kiss.

-

“Are those _hickeys_?” Allison greets them, effectively getting the whole table to look at Andrew’s neck.

“Careful, Reynolds,” Neil says easily, pointing a breadstick at her. “I know what sordid things _you_ got up to last night and I don’t think you want polite company to hear about them.”

“Pfft,” Allison says, waving her hand at the others, “there’s nothing polite about _this_ company.”

She doesn’t mention the hickeys again, though, or the fact that Neil and Andrew arrived together. Her narrowed eyes keep watching them, and when Andrew catches her gaze and raises a challenging eyebrow, she makes a little “I see you” gesture and cracks her knuckles loudly.

Giovanni’s is busy that night and their table is more crowded than usual. Aaron and Katelyn have brought the girls, Seth has miraculously conjured up a girlfriend—something which occupies at least a third of the conversation at any given time—and Kevin keeps leaning back to talk to a raucous group of people he knows from college, seated at the table next to theirs. Andrew and Neil have a bet running on how long it’s going to take him to tip his chair over all the way and fall down, but so far there have only been narrow misses.

The room is noisy and hot despite the air conditioning. Andrew inhales his seafood pasta and a glass of white wine before excusing himself to go outside for a cigarette he won’t smoke. Even if he hadn’t quit last year just to prove to himself that he could, he wouldn’t smoke while Rosie and Lila are around. So he just leans against the rough brick of the building, turns his face into the meagre breeze and looks at the distant night sky until the tight, heavy feeling in his stomach could reasonably be an overzealous helping of pasta.

“Hey,” someone says. Andrew looks up to find Renee offering him a stick of bubblegum. “Mind if I join you?”

“Yes,” Andrew says, sliding two sticks out of the pack. “But I am amenable to bribery, so you can stay.”

Renee laughs and takes a stick for herself before sliding it back into her pocket.

“It can get a bit overwhelming in there,” she says, leaning against the wall next to him and tilting her head up, mimicking his pose. Andrew neither confirms nor denies her observation and chews his gum, inhaling the sweet night air.

“It’s not so bad though, is it?” Renee goes on. “Being part of something. Even if the something is loud and rowdy sometimes.”

“This,” Andrew says, motioning at the restaurant behind him, “is not my answer.”

“No, nor is it mine,” Renee agrees, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “I don’t think anyone can be anyone’s answer. But it makes the question easier to bear some days.”

Andrew thinks of Aaron, so scared of being a bad father to his children. Of Neil who goes nights without sleeping and still scrubs his hands raw on bad days. Of the track marks on Matt’s arms, Seth’s relapse last year, the pictures of Dan in a colourful headscarf after her chemo. Self-doubt and sneaked cigarettes and sunburns because you forgot to apply sunscreen even though you reminded everyone else.

“You’re one of us now,” Renee tells him with a smile. “Whether you like it or not.”

Andrew sighs and rolls his eyes and mutters, “Parasites, the lot of you.”

Renee laughs and offers her arm, and for once Andrew lets her hook it around his as they go back inside to see what nonsense their friends have come up with in their absence.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this fic, click the lil heart button to leave kudos, type random keysmashes into the comment box, leave a note when you bookmark or come sweet-talk me on [Tumblr](https://annawrites.tumblr.com), where you can find my fic moodboards and also copious amounts of cats and tea related posts. Either way I hope you're all safe and healthy wherever u are, take care xxx


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